Samsung focuses on easy photo sharing with its 14-megapixel SH100 digital camera. With this $199.99 (list) touch-screen point-and-shoot, you can transfer photos to your PC and upload pictures to Facebook via Wi-Fi. You can even use your Samsung Galaxy S Android phone as a remote viewfinder. These innovative wireless features make the camera a blast to use, but with no optical image stabilization, it fails in low-light shooting situations.

Design and Features
Very pocketable, the SH100 weighs just 3.8 ounces and measures a slim 0.7 inches thick, 2.1 inches wide, and 3.7 inches long. It offers touch screen control plus a handful of physical buttons for mission critical operations: Zoom In/Out, Shutter Release, Playback, and Home Screen. The UI on the SH100 is more colorful than most touch-screen cameras like the Canon PowerShot Elph 500 HS ($229.99, 4 stars), looking more like Samsung's Galaxy phones, complete with app-like colored buttons against a black background. There are fives pages of these apps to swipe through, including shooting modes, color effect modes multiple Wi-Fi functions.

The 26 to 130mm (35mm equivalent), 5x optical zoom lens has no optical stabilization and a corresponding aperture of f/3.3-f/5.9. Most cameras in this price range offer optical image stabilization, which shifts the lens or sensor to adjust for camera shake to help reduce blur. Without this feature, you need to shoot with a faster shutter speed or a higher ISO sensitivity to prevent blurriness. In well-lit conditions, like outdoors on bright sunny days, this generally isn't an issue, but indoors you need to use a slower shutter to get the same amount of light on the sensor to form the photo.
The 26 to 130mm (35mm equivalent), 5x optical zoom lens has a corresponding aperture of f/3.3-f/5.9 and, as mentioned above, no optical stabilization. Most cameras in this price range offer optical image stabilization, which shifts the lens or sensor to adjust for camera shake to help reduce blur. It's most helpful when you shoot in low light without a flash, as these shots typically require slow shutter speeds because the sensors must be exposed for a longer amount of time. Stabilization keeps the lens from shifting so your picture comes out crisp. Without it, you significantly increase the chances of ending up with a blurry photo in these shooting scenarios.

The 3-inch touch LCD works well, and provides a good navigation experience. It only responds to one touch at a time, though, there's no support for multitouchso you can't pinch or zoom. The display has just 230K dots, standard for a camera in this price range. The display feels a bit cramped when shooting at full resolution because photos have a 4:3 aspect ratio, but the display is 16:9 widescreenthe live view is just 2.5 of the 3 inches of the screen, pillarboxed by black bars on each side. The Editors' Choice Kodak EasyShare M580's ($199.95, 4 stars) 3-inch, 230K-dot screen has a 4:3 aspect ratio so you can use the entire screen when shooting in full resolution.

Samsung has gone above and beyond with Wi-Fi in the SH100. Some of the uses are a bit gimmicky, but several are very useful.
You can email photos directly from the camera (though they're downsized from 14- to 2-megapixel resolution). The feature is easy to use, thanks to the in-camera address book. You can also upload pictures to Facebook, view your uploaded albums, and comment on your photos right from the camera. Videos can be uploaded directly to YouTube, but resolution is limited to 320 by 240, a major downgrade from the camera's peak resolution of 1280 by 720. The camera can act as a DLNA server through an app called AllShare, letting any DLNA device connected to the same Wi-Fi network browse, download, and even play back photos and videos on the camera.

You can automatically send images and videos to your Windows PC wirelessly, like you can do with the Eye-Fi Mobile X2 SD card (79.99, 4 stars). The camera is smart enough to only transfer new photos, so you won't have tons of duplicates or endless overwrite prompts on your computer. You need your computer to be connected to the same Wi-Fi network as the camera and to have special software installed (included with the SH100), but it can wake your computer up from Sleep mode or completely power it up whenever you start shooting. This feature worked flawlessly with my Windows 7 laptop.

Finally, and most impressively, you can use Samsung smartphones to control the SH100 and use the phone as a viewfinder. Currently this app is only available for Samsung Galaxy phones, but Samsung says that may change in the future. If you go into the Android market on your Samsung Android phone and search for "Remote Viewfinder," you can find and download the free app. When you load it up and set up the SH100 to work with the feature, the two devices will connect and a live view display will appear on the phone. You can snap photos, control the optical zoom, and set the timer, all from your smartphone. The Android app also gives you the option to store photos on both the SH100 and your phone. The entire system works really well and requires virtually no setup.

Performance
The SH100 can snap a single image quickly, with only a half second of shutter lag. However, it's sluggish at both waking up and taking multiple shots. According to our tests, the SH100 took an average of 3.5 seconds from power up to its first image capture, and spends an average of 2.7 seconds between each shot.

In the PCMag labs we use the Imatest suite to objectively measure image quality. In terms of sharpness, the camera offered a center-weighted average of 1,876 lines per picture height. This is impressive, considering a point and shoot that costs twice as much, the Canon PowerShot S95 ($399.99, 4 stars), produced 1,858 lines. However like many $200 cameras, the low-light capabilities are very limited. The SH100 can shoot up to and including ISO 400 while keeping noise levels below 1.5 percent (the threshold at which an image typically becomes visibly noisy). The Canon PowerShot S95 keeps levels below 1.5 percent all the way up to ISO 1600. The same-price Canon PowerShot Elph 100 HS ($199.99, 3.5 stars) offered a center weighted averaged of 1,692 lines per picture height and kept noise levels below 1.5 percent up to ISO 1600. Again, since the SH100 doesn't have any mechanical image stabilization, this hurts its ability to shoot in low light.

Despite all of its nifty Wi-Fi tricks, Connectivity on the SH100 isn't great. The camera offers a single port with a proprietary cable for connecting to a computer's USB port. Considering the camera writes to microSD cards rather than standard SD cards, you have three options: don't lose the cable, only transfer photos over Wi-Fi, or get a microSD-to-SD card adapter for use with a card reader.

The Samsung SH100 could be a good fit for you if you're a casual shooter who wants the automatic, wireless transfers, but this feature comes at the expense of a basic feature: image stabilization. If you want to do any sort of low-light shooting without a flash, this definitely isn't the camera for you. If you're interested in the Wi-Fi capabilities, try an EyeFi card, which will work with any camera with an SD slot, and can wirelessly back up photos to your computer as well as transfer photos to any Android or iOS device.